For many (but not all) of our customers, Billable Users is the single biggest determinant of their Files.com cost.

We have structured our policies around Users to be customer friendly and make it as easy as possible to manage your user count.

We sometimes refer to the User Count metric as "Inbound Connections" because a User account is required for a system or person to initiate an inbound connection to your Files.com site.

We are customer friendly with regard to billing matters. If there are specific issues with your bill as it relates to users, our billing team is happy to help.

Billable Users

Any User on your account that isn't Non-Billable (as described below) counts as a Billable User.

Child Sites

All the billable users from your child sites count together with your parent site's billable users. If you make a user account on both the parent site and a child site—even for the same person or system—it counts as 2 separate users. If instead you give a parent site user permission to access child sites, that user only counts as 1 billable user, no matter how many sites they can use.

User Counting Paradigms

We offer two different paradigms for determining how billable user counts are determined, determined by your pricing plan.

Our most common paradigm (in use prior to mid-2025) categorizes users as Billable or Non-Billable based on whether the user account has been used and whether it has been disabled.

We recently launched an alternative paradigm which instead categorizes users as System or Human, based on whether they've ever used a non-automated means of accessing Files.com. Under this paradigm System users are offered at a reduced cost, but the other mechanics of users being Non-Billable are removed. This paradigm was designed to make Files.com's licensing model more closely align to other cloud-based MFT vendors. This paradigm is being offered as a test and it is not yet available in all situations.

If this System vs. Human paradigm applies to your account, it will have been clearly spelled out on either your Proposal and Order Form, or on the website when you made a self service purchase. The Non-Billable User mechanic described below does not apply to customers on this paradigm.

Customers may switch from one paradigm to another by contacting our Account Management team.

Non-Billable Users

For customers not on a plan that distinguishes System Users from Human Users, we treat certain users as Non-Billable.

There are two main categories of Non-Billable Users.

Users Which Have Not Logged in Or Used The API

User accounts that have never logged in to your site are not considered Billable.

This rule is designed to encourage customers to upload user lists in bulk or via Single Sign On (SSO) or SCIM, while only paying for users actually using the Files.com service.

Disabled Users

You can also Disable a User which will preserve their permissions and settings.

The first time a given User is Disabled, we will stop counting it as Billable immediately.

However, If the same User is later Enabled and Disabled again, it will then be counted as Billable until 90 days after it was re-disabled, at which point we will stop counting it as Billable.

The purpose of this rule is to discourage customers from building Automations which toggle the disabled status of Users to keep their Billable User Count artificially low.

Billable User Count

Your Billable User Count for billing purposes is the highest number of Billable Users reached at any point during the Usage Period. Usage Periods are 30-day long periods that either represent a monthly billing cycle or a portion of an annual term, as defined in the Terms of Service.

If you are on a Plan type that treats System users separately from Human users, a Billable User Count will be computed separately for each type of user.

Invoice Mechanism For Overages

If your actual Billable User Count(s) count exceeds the purchased user count(s), we will process an adjustment one of two ways, depending on your billing cycle.

For monthly payers, the cost of the additional users will be added as overage line items on your next monthly invoice.

For annual (or longer) payers, an additional "true up" invoice will be generated at the end of the Usage Period to add those users to the balance of your annual subscription. For example, if there were 7 months remaining and you used 10 Billable Users beyond what you've already purchased, we would send an invoice for 7 [months] * 10 [users] * [user cost]. The incremental user cost is provided in your Proposal, or listed on our website for customers on Self Service plans.

If you are on a Plan type that treats System users separately from Human users, Overages will be processed using the above mechanism for each type of user.

User Account Sharing

User accounts may not be shared by multiple people, internal services, integrations, business units, customers, locations, or counterparties.

Such sharing is dangerous for account security because you will not be able to know who performed actions on a shared account.

If you must share a User Account for a specific business purpose (for example, supporting certain legacy FTP configurations), you need to be on a Premier or Enterprise plan and execute a specific agreement to allow User Account Sharing. We need to review and understand your use case to determine the impact of your use case on our cloud infrastructure.

We have mechanisms to detect User Account sharing without a valid agreement and if we detect it, we reserve the right to require that you move to a Premier or Enterprise plan and execute a specific agreement to continue your User Account Sharing.

To learn more about this, contact our Account Management team. Feel free to give us a call at 1-800-286-8372, ext 2 during USA business hours, or book a Zoom or phone call on our calendar.